Beware the Living

"These zombies, they're annoying, sure, but they're easy to kill. Kinda fun, even. The real threat is the people. An outbreak like this does things to men. All the violence... The death... Seeing loved ones die... Change... It makes people snap, just like that."

— Chuck Greene, Dead Rising 2: Off the Record

Let's face it; zombies, on an individual level, aren't really that threatening. Sure, they may be impervious to pain and capable of infecting their victims with a single bite, but they're slow, they're clumsy, and they lack the mental capacity to use any kind of tools. Chances are, as long as you have good aim, you'll be able to dispose of them with ease.

But in a Zombie Apocalypse, you may find yourself face-to-face with monsters far more terrifying than the living dead. They're cunning, resilient, resourceful, and absolutely ruthless... and by now, you probably know where this is going: Humans Are the Real Monsters.

Indeed, in zombie fiction, the protagonists will often come to realize that zombies are not the most dangerous thing they'll be facing. The real threat will come from roaming gangs of bandits, psychotic military officers determined to mow down everything in sight, malicious military forces, overly paranoid survivalists who simply can't trust anyone, whatever corrupt law enforcement was born of (or remains in the aftermath of) the disaster or even normal, everyday people who were either Driven to Madness or ruthlessness born out of desperation by the horror going on around them.

This trope refers to works that either imply or outright state that fellow survivors can be just as dangerous, if not more so, than the undead menace.

A Sub-Trope of Humans Are the Real Monsters. May overlap with Friendly Zombie, if the zombies turn out to be non-malevolent, and the only real threat comes from humans.

Examples

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Anime & Manga

Played for Black Comedy in the Franken Fran chapter "Living Dead", where the "zombies" turn out to be alive in a more than semantic sense—they could all easily be cured. Problem is, the uninfected quickly assumed they were zombies and started killing them, and thus were responsible for most of the actual deaths.

Comic Books

Crossed: While the titular Crossed are psychopathic, sadistic, murderous cannibal rapists (and all five of those can apply in one scene), many of the surviving humans aren't much better.
- The biggest example would be the ranch owner who started a religious cult (and had been raping his daughter for years).
- The protagonists also shoot a bunch of children in cold blood (they would likely have starved/become Crossed otherwise, but that doesn't make them feel any better). They try to justify this in that the kids had been unwitting cannibals but...
- Lampshaded by Stan, who points out that the Crossed are doing nothing that normal humans can't do, and have been doing as long as our species has existed.
- One of the single worst humans was Beauregard Salt, a Serial Killer who didn't even notice the rash or accompanying descent into evil. He kept his intelligence, and set out to ensure that the Crossed would remain a threat to humanity over the centuries, even without him to guide them.
The Walking Dead includes several examples of this, particularly The Governor, who happily feeds survivors from outside his town to the zombies in order to keep them 'docile'. You know this is going on pretty hard when the eventual Title Drop is not describing the zombies, but actually the despairing protagonists after one time too many of this Trope being used to Yank the Dog's Chain.

Film — Animated

The zombies in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island never actually try to harm the protagonists. As revealed at the end of the film, the zombies are actually victims of a life-draining curse cast by the main villains of the movie, Lena and Simone. Every harvest moon, the zombies rise to scare away visitors, keeping their operation secret.

Film — Live-Action

In 28 Days Later, the protagonists face their biggest threat not from the zombies but from the group of soldiers they encounter.
Cargo (2013): Vic is willing to use other humans (albeit in protected cages) as bait to lure in zombies to kill, and is keeping a woman named Lorraine against her will (although whether as a Sex Slave or just to maintain some feeling of domestic normalcy in his home is unclear).
This trope is a major theme in George A. Romero's Living Dead Series, which is also probably the Ur-Example and Trope Codifier.
- Night of the Living Dead (1968), the sole survivor of the film gets shot by some redneck zombie hunter, who doesn't bother checking whether his target is alive or not. In the following parts of the series, that focus more on the effects of the Zombie Apocalypse on human society, people fall in complete anarchy. More often than not, the zombies actually end up working for the favor of the protagonists by killing the humans who pose a more considerable threat to them.
- Dawn of the Dead (1978) especially takes delight in pointing this out, there are several scenes where humans can simply walk through crowds of zombies, since their reaction time is so poor they're only dangerous if you get yourself trapped or act like an idiot... which of course is what tons of people do. The living are more interested in screaming at each other, go on killing sprees or engage in looting while society is falling down around them, and letting the zombie apocalypse spiral out of control.
Savageland: A running theme in the film is that the humans trying to cover up the truth of the Sangre De Cristo disaster or who are trying to spin it for their own ends are just as dangerous as the zombies that massacred the town in the first place. Notably, Sole Survivor Salazar managed to survive in one piece (trauma notwithstanding), only to be executed by humans who scapegoated him for the incident.
Shaun of the Dead: In this romantic comedy with zombies, David is a very straight use of this trope: he is a militant Commander Contrarian (who is actually too much of a twat for anybody to wish to agree with the few points he brings up), he brings literally nothing to the group^note, is only there to see Shaun fail so he can get with Liz^note, his act of Lethally Stupid impulsiveness to get away from the group when it's clear he will never have Liz leads to the Winchester being invaded by the zombies and everybody (barring Dianne in deleted scenes) but Shaun and Liz dying.
Stake Land: While the film has vampires instead of zombies, the overall atmosphere is the same, and Jebedia Loven and his Ax-Crazy Apocalypse Cult are just as dangerous to the characters as the vampires are.
Train to Busan: As dangerous as the film's zombies are, the Corrupt Corporate Executive Young-suk is even worse. He is personally responsible for a large number of the cast, primary and secondary, dying as he tries to keep his own ass safe. Appropriately enough, it's his lone, zombified self, and not a gigantic horde of zombies, who serves as the final obstacle between the remaining survivors and safety.

Literature

In The Day of the Triffids, the triffids are a hazard, but the most dangerous threats faced by the protagonists are humans choosing to take advantage of the associated societal collapse.
Brian Keene is well known for zombie fiction, but that's not to say that he can't write some downright disturbing human antagonists as well.
- In The Rising series, while the zombies may be the most serious threat to the world, the various humans are nothing to laugh at either. In The Rising, a drug gang and a cannibal duo nearly kill three of the protagonists before the real bastards pop up- the Pennsylvania National Guard, who are mostly a brigade of psychopathic rapists armed with tanks and heavy weaponry. While City of the Dead puts the focus almost fully on the zombies, some humans again prove to be a Spanner in the Works. Selected Scenes From the End of the World has living humans fill the role as antagonists throughout the book until the penultimate chapter, owing to the world being burned to a crisp.
- This is downplayed in the non-Rising book Dead Sea- the human threat is mostly overshadowed by The Virus, but the one visit to the mainland results in a survivor killing two crew members, and before the boat sails most of Baltimore's survivors end up killing each other.
Newsflesh: The living are definitely as big a threat, or worse, than the zombies. They try to control the remaining living with fear, and with weaponized zombie outbreaks.
In A Song of Ice and Fire, this trope is in effect beyond the Wall. There roam the Others and their undead hordes, but some of the Night's Watch (especially the deserters, mutineers and their ilk) and many Wildlings can be just as vicious.
In This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It, the "zombies" are actually people possessed by parasitic spiders that turn them into horrific monsters, but they're similar enough (and the government encourages people to think of them as zombies once the news breaks, anyway). The monstered-out possessed are pretty damn dangerous, but it's revealed that the spiders never actually spread that far, and most of the casualties are uninfected people killed by trigger-happy paranoid mobs.
World War Z has a soldier grumbling about how the most threatening thing they faced wasn't zombies; it was human survivalists who had been holding out for years and refused to return to civilization, often setting up all kinds of traps that were invariably much more dangerous to other humans than they were to zombies. They were nicknamed "Last Men on Earth" or "LaMOEs" for their egotistic attitudes.
The Zombie Survival Guide devotes one chapter to weighing the pros and cons of different types of shelter, from schools to office buildings to churches. When discussing prisons, the author mentions that it's often safer to confront ten zombies than it is to take on one hardened criminal.
- The book also notes that the two worst places you could seek shelter during the initial outbreak, are 1) police stations and 2) gun stores. Police stations will be quickly flooded by unprepared citizens freaking out (which would attract the zombies). Gun stores will probably already be occupied by the owner (leaving you outside and unarmed, helplessly shouting to a very paranoid man who might just shoot you) or by a bunch of crazy people looking for firearms (who would probably shoot you dead the moment you walked in).

Live-Action TV

All of Us Are Dead:
- The zombies kill and infect everything in their path, but the Big Bad of the first season is Gwi-nam, a sociopathic bully responsible for killing and infecting students and teachers that could have otherwise survive. He is bitten by zombies but manages to keep his humanity and sentience intact out of his desire for revenge and endless violence.
- Na-yeon is a Rich Bitch with a hate-boner for people from poor backgrounds. She infects the poor (but otherwise a very sweet) Han Gyeong-su out of spite for his "welfie" status.
- In the end, the army choses to bomb the 60,000 of the survivors left in Hyosan than to let the zombie virus spread to the rest of the country and the world.
The BBC Miniseries In the Flesh features an interesting variation on this trope. It presents a universe in which zombies are actually capable of behaving like completely normal humans, and the main conflict of the story concerns the Fantastic Racism they suffer at the hands of the living.
Most of the conflict of The Walking Dead (2010) comes fron human threats rather than walkers. At the start of the series, the characters struggle against zombies, but as time goes on in the series the characters have adjusted to zombies as a reality, yet the danger of humans becomes more and more severe. Season 2 marked the point where the main antagonist is a living human being, and from then on, the walkers are still dangerous, but aren't considered the main threat (and are often weaponized by both heroes and villains alike).
Z Nation has multiple examples, including a Zombie Advocate cult that turns a refuge into a Safe Zone Hope Spot early on (and kills the Decoy Protagonist leader of the survivors), The Remnant of The Cartel (that is trying to take over what's left and using drugs boosted with zombie fertilizer as their personal Bread and Circuses), the man that caused the Zombie Apocalypse and his minions and eventually members of an invading nation. And then there's the Wild Card that is Murphy.

Tabletop Games

In Dead of Winter zombies are a constant problem but the real conflict arises from the fact that each player has their own secret agenda despite everyone supposedly playing cooperatively. Some agendas require the player to hoard vital supplies without which the other players will suffer penalties. Others outright require you to arrange for other characters to get killed off.
In Red Markets, "the living" include the corrupt members of what remains of the government in the aftermath of the Zombie Apocalypse (who left pretty much anybody west of the Mississippi River to die, for starters), the vile corporations that hunt down the few people immune to the virus (or at least somewhat more resistant) in order to harvest them to sell off antiviral drugs (made of said people) to the masses and the Zombie Advocate cults, as well as people who work to scavenge enough resources to pay for a better living who will do anything to achieve that One Last Job.

Video Games

Call of Duty: Zombies:
- An outright Zombie Apocalypse is the main arc of the Victis storyline and gets Played With. Most human survivors we hear from on the radio outside of the group are actually pretty normal people who get along, with some even openly inviting other survivors to join them at their safe-zones. But the survivors of Earth start getting pushed into conflict by Richtofen and Maxis, who are dueling for control of the Aether and have incompatible demands and plans. Richtofen's followers in particular lose their sanity due to having consumed zombie flesh to survive, causing them in particular to become hostile to other survivors. So it's not really the other human survivors causing trouble, it's the otherworldly forces at play directing them to cause trouble.
- The game mode has zombies as the main threat, but they completely pale in comparison to the true evil behind them, the Apothicons, who seeded realities with the element needed to reanimate dead people in the first place as a nudge in the right direction to unleash them from their realm onto ours. The playable characters who do know what's going on eventually regard zombies as a nuisance compared to more dangerous antagonists like Samantha, the Shadow Man, and Doctor Monty.
While most of the survivors in Dead Island are friendly and willing to help (provided you help them out in exchange), there are also human gangsters that players will encounter about mid-way through the game who are considerably more dangerous than the zombies due to being armed with guns, meaning they can kill you from a distance and they will shoot the moment you're in their range of sight.
Dead Rising
- The game uses this trope extensively and lampshades it on more than one occasion. Zombies are relatively easy to kill, but the true challenge comes from taking down the bosses of the game (dubbed "Psychopaths") who are generally either regular humans who were driven insane or sadistic sociopaths who are simply taking advantage of the situation. And that's not even getting into the second part of the game, when the special forces agents show up...
- In one scene in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, Chuck Greene effortlessly restrains a female zombie while commenting on how easy they are to kill compared to psychotic survivors (or as he calls them, 'nutbars').
Most of the survivors in The Last of Us are not on your side; or, for that matter, anyone's. At one point, Bill (the hero's Crazy-Prepared ally) remarks that he's more afraid of other survivors than infected, since the infected are at most predictable.
Mocked in Left 4 Dead, which features a piece of graffiti saying "WE ARE THE REAL MONSTERS"... and a bunch of graffiti under it harshly rebuking the writer.
No, that's the zombies
YOU ARE A REAL MORON
Moron.
IDIOT
I think it's them stupid
Have you been outside JACKASS!!
I HOPE YOU ARE DEAD NOW
I miss the internet.
Rebuild 2: While the zombies are the main threat, the vilest enemies are the Last Judgement gang, a religious cult insisting on killing anyone who doesn't follow their beliefs (and the less said about how they treat women the better). During the assault on their compound (one of the game's Multiple Endings) the attackers blow a hole in the LJ's walls, flooding them with zombies.
In the Resident Evil franchise, the threat posed by zombie outbreaks is typically just a sign of the much larger threat posed by the Umbrella Corp (and various other Big Bads when they finally get shut down between Resident Evil – Code: Veronica and Resident Evil 4) and the weaponised mutants they manufacture from the "lucky" few who don't turn into zombies.
In an interesting version of this trope, in DayZ, other players are often times much more dangerous than the zombies, as organized groups of bandits will shoot you on sight for supplies, to make sure that you don't kill them, or simply For the Evulz.
This can also happen in Urban Dead. While zombies definitely pose a threat (particularly when organised en masse), other human players can prove to be a pain in the arse in different ways. Free running allows them to get into buildings in order to destroy generators, pick other survivors off one by one and destroy barricades. God help you if you fall victim to a Zerg Rush (which is supposed to be illegal).
The Walking Dead (Telltale): As in the comic series, when the main characters aren't fighting cannibals, bandits, kidnappers, and quasi-dictators, they're fighting each other. All things considered, walkers only serve as tools with which the characters can be killed off; the conflict comes from humans.

Webcomics

In Dead Winter, zombies have your typical Zombie Gait and no fancy powers, leaving other humans as the main threat. Such as The Yellow Ponchos,^* The Army/National Guard^* and last but not least The Police^*

Web Original

This trope is discussed and subjected to a refreshingly optimistic Deconstruction by Cracked. As many Real Life survivors of disasters can attest, the first thing members of a community do when struck by one is to quickly seek out and help neighbors, not panic and go at each other's throats as order crumbles.

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